Let's Talk Change in a University: A Simple Model for Addressing a Complex Agenda

This paper reports on a real‐life study in a US university. In response to financial issues, the administration at an undergraduate tuition‐dependent university pushed for growth in student enrollment. The faculty, who argued that the quality of education had been declining, resisted the expansion. More students also affected the use of the university's infrastructure. By actively engaging key stakeholders, we developed a simple system dynamics model of university expansion. A major insight suggests that policy decisions made non‐holistically might result in counter‐intuitive outcomes that could take considerable time from which to recover. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.